Archive for April, 2016

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives has claimed ownership of a mysterious box that was removed from a utility pole in Phoenix, Arizona.

Phoenix resident Brian Clegg was concerned about a box he witnessed being installed on a power pole. Clegg said the box was facing his house and he believed it may have had cameras inside. The pole was owned by Arizona’s largest power provider, SRP, who claimed no one had permission to put the box on their pole. Brian Clegg says shortly afterwards SRP sent a crew to remove the box.

Shortly after ABC15 investigated the matter, the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives(ATF), a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, acknowledged installing the box as part of an ongoing investigation. Officials with the ATF would not provide details about their alleged investigation and would not confirm if they were conducting surveillance in the area.

SRP told ABC15 they were unaware the box had been installed and that the ATF has to notify them if they are going install something on their property. The ATF told ABC15 they can put security measures in place without asking for permission. Obviously the federal government feels comfortable doing whatever it wants to do, whenever it wants to, law be damned.

One other interesting aspect of Clegg’s story is the fact that he claims the crew who installed the box came in a truck marked “Field Pros.” The thought of undercover government agents installing surveillance equipment while masquerading as utility workers is highly disturbing and sounds like a scene right out of a Hollywood film. Unfortunately, Phoenix is not the only city to have surveillance equipment installed by an agency of the federal government.

Washington DC residents took to Twitter on Saturday, outraged by how the city’s metro staff handled the latest accident with heavy smoke and mass evacuation. DC’s metro has been facing calls for a complete overhaul, as it poses a “daily danger” to riders.

Locals are used to feeling frustrated with their own metro system, but Saturday’s incident seemed to be the last straw, as hundreds of tweets were posted online, criticizing the metro and its staff.

Tenleytown and Friendship Heights Metro stations were evacuated after reports that an explosion in a mechanical room had caused a fire and heavy smoke.

Witnesses said there was lack of communication, which caused chaos, when flames and heavy smoke became visible and seemed to be entering one of the train.

Passengers in the train were not informed as to what was happening, nor were they told that the train was going to reverse and go back to Tenleytown station.

Riders described “losing confidence” in the system and beginning to “self-evacuate” for the fear of dying in the subway tunnel.

Making things worse was the incident fresh on the DC riders’ mind when a woman died in the metro just over a year ago in a smoke-filled subway car near the L’Enfant Plaza station.

Twitter users also said that the metro simply got “lucky” that there were no injuries this time around, warning that next time things might play out differently, unless the system improves.

Overall, residents’ tone remained very pessimistic, with hopeless messages that even incidents like the one on Saturday won’t force the metro to make significant upgrades.

Some responses shed light on how serious the problem appears to many people, with metro riders describing carrying a special list of items when using the subway, including respirators, masks, flashlights and comfortable shoes.

Once again the mainstream media’s explanation for an important revelation might be lacking. However, that explanation is really just a translation of research from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“While a small amount of mercury is naturally present in the environment, it’s the mercury emitted primarily from coal-powered plants that has found its way into the oceans.

From there, the mercury rides funnels of water that are created by winds and gets to the surface in a process known as upwelling. Then the mercury — in a form called methylmercury — is sucked up from the ocean into fog, which rolls over the coast.”

Flint, Michigan has become the epicenter of the lead water crisis in the United States, but hundreds of schools across the country have tested positive for unsafe lead levels in their water over the past three years, according to a new report.

In fact, 278 schools violated the safety levels for lead created by the Environmental Protection Agency since 2013, the Associated Press reported, citing its analysis of government data. In the past year alone, 64 schools tested for unsafe water.

About 90 schools had lead levels in the water that were at least double what the federal government considers acceptable, according to the data. The EPA states that lead levels over 15 parts per billion are unsafe ad require action.

Even these statistics may offer only a snapshot of the situation, since the data comes from schools and daycare centers that are required to test their water for lead. Ninety percent of schools in the US get their water from municipal systems, meaning local officials are responsible for testing the water at separate locations. If a school has its own water system, it’s responsible for testing, though a facility can be declared safe even if one drinking fountain is delivering unsafe water, AP reported.

The good news is that the source of the problem is fairly easy to pinpoint. Generally, lead gets into the water at buildings and schools that are older and were built to feature lead delivery pipes. The water can leach lead off the pipes and become contaminated, particularly over weekends when sinks and drinking fountains aren’t being used.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to halt an execution on Tuesday despite a juror’s racial slurs against the inmate.

Alex Brandon/AP

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to halt the scheduled execution of a Georgia man convicted of murder on Tuesday despite evidence his sentencing jury had been tainted by racism. Thomas Buffington, a juror in the 1997 trial of Kenneth Fults, signed an affidavit in 2005 saying “that’s what that nigger deserved.”

Georgia executed Fults by lethal injection at 7:37 p.m. local time, according to a statement from the state attorney general’s office.

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied a request for clemency on Monday, leaving the high court as his last remaining chance at avoiding lethal injection. Fults filed an eleventh-hour request last week for the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied previous petitions to hear his case, to directly intervene.

Fults’ execution Tuesday night will come almost 20 years after the original crime. Fults, a black man, pled guilty to the January 1996 murder of Cathy Bounds, his white neighbor, after shooting her five times in the back of the head during a series of burglaries. The jury sentenced him to death in May of 1997.

After sentencing, Fults’ case began the complex appeals process that accompanies any death-penalty case. First, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and sentence on direct review in June 2001. From there, Fults then sought a separate habeas review in the state courts in 2003 and in federal courts in 2009.

While his lawyers gathered evidence for the state habeas review, one of their investigators interviewed Buffington, who served on the jury that sentenced Fults to death. Buffington had told the court during jury selection he held no racial biases. Eight years later, his answer changed.

“I don’t know if [Fults] ever killed anybody, but that nigger got just what should have happened,” the 79-year-old man said in a sworn affidavit in April 2005. “Once he pled guilty, I knew I would vote for the death penalty because that’s what that nigger deserved.”

With farmers market season upon us, anyone looking for extra incentive to get up early on Saturday to check out the organic offerings from local growers might want to take a gander at the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen,” the organization’s annual roundup of conventionally grown produce most likely to be contaminated with pesticides.

And that plural—pesticides—is no joke: Despite growing consumer demand for healthier, more sustainably grown food, many samples of the most contaminated produce tested positive for residues from not one but two or more chemical pesticides. A single sample of strawberries contained residues from a whopping 17 different pesticides.

The EWG’s new list, released Tuesday, is based on tests conducted in 2014 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on close to 7,000 samples. While nearly three-quarters of those samples contained residue from at least one pesticide, the advocacy group crunched the numbers to once again come up with its list of the dozen different fruits and veggies that chemical-conscious consumers should be most wary of. So, without further ado…

White police officers in the small South Carolina city of Aiken recorded themselves exposing an African-American driver’s breasts and “searching” her partner’s rectum, as revealed in a video released by the Washington Post.

Dashcam video of the October 2014 incident show local cops pulling over a vehicle under the guise of driving with a temporary paper license plate, which is not illegal in South Carolina.

Trigger warning: This video contains racist language and images of what’s been called police harassment

Instead, the federal lawsuit filed last year, and revealed this week as part of the Post’s investigation, says there were a number of procedural and constitutional failures, saying, “We refuse to create the suspect presumption in this state that every motorist traveling the highways with a temporary tag is guilty of driving an unregistered or uninsured car and is subject to detention until he or she can prove otherwise.”

Passenger Elijah Pontoon was handcuffed and told it was because of his criminal record, even though the lawsuit points out there is no law to justify it.

Just before officers searched the car with a sniffer dog without any probable cause, according to the lawsuit, Officer Chris Medlin referred to him with an old-fashioned racist slur.

“Because of your history, I’ve got a dog coming in here,” Medlin was heard saying. “Gonna walk a dog around the car. You gonna pay for this one, boy.”